Permanent lights on the front of the house only: is it enough?

What most people see from the street

For most houses, front-only permanent lighting is enough. The street elevation is the view nearly everyone gets: the neighbor walking a dog, the car pulling into the driveway, you coming home at night. On a typical Troy or Sterling Heights two-story colonial that face runs 120 to 180 feet of roofline, and it carries almost all of the visual effect for a fraction of the cost of wrapping the whole house.

Think about the angles. From the sidewalk you see one full elevation and, at most, a narrow slice of each side. On a subdivision street in Sterling Heights or Macomb Township, the side walls face a neighbor's side yard across a narrow gap, and the back faces a fence line. Channel on those edges mostly lights the house next door.

So the useful question is not "front or everything." It is which elevations anyone actually looks at after dark, and the answer on most lots is one. The exceptions are specific, and they are covered below: corner lots, a back deck or lake view you use every evening, and houses where the front run cannot end cleanly without wrapping a corner.

Footage and price: front vs full perimeter

The rate does not change with scope. Permanent lighting is $22–34 per lit foot, installed once, and the peaks, dormers, stories and trim complexity of your house decide where in that band it lands. Lighting less of the house simply means fewer feet at the same kind of rate.

Why does the full loop run double or more? On a plain two-story box, the back eave is about as long as the front. The two side walls then add their own edges: on a side-gable colonial those are the rakes climbing to each peak, and on a hip roof the eave just keeps wrapping. Add an attached garage and the back and side of that too, so on many houses the full loop is at least twice the front, and it varies house to house.

Here is one front-only example from inside each city page's range for that house type, beside what the same house would cost if the full loop came to double that:

The doubling in the table is a planning shorthand, not a rule, and your own house could land well under or over it. All figures are paid once. Troy colonials typically carry 120 to 180 feet across the front, and Sterling Heights smaller two-stories 100 to 150 feet, which is why the front-only column is the place to start. If you want the per-foot math broken down further, the guide to permanent lighting cost per foot walks through it.

Where to end a run so it looks intentional

The biggest risk with front-only lighting is not what you skip. It is a line that stops somewhere that looks like the budget ran out. A run that ends at an outside corner looks designed. A run that ends mid-eave, or at a downspout, looks unfinished from every angle.

These are the endpoints that hold up after dark:

1. The outside corner of the house. The cleanest stop there is. The light line and the wall end together, and the eye reads the front as a complete shape.
2. The far corner of an attached garage. If the garage is lit, the run ends where the garage ends, not at the seam.
3. A short return around the corner. On a hip roof, where the eave already wraps, turning the corner and ending a short way down the side gives the front some depth from an angled view. Keep the return short and the same on both ends, so it reads as a deliberate wrap rather than a line that wandered off.

A side-gable colonial needs one extra decision. The front eave ends at the corner where the side gable begins. Stopping there is clean. Climbing the side rakes to the peak turns the side into its own lit shape, which is a second elevation, not a finishing touch. Which individual lines to light within the front itself is covered in the roofline layout guide.

Corner lots and two street faces

A corner lot has two fronts. The side facing the second street is seen by every car that turns the corner, and on a side-gable colonial it is a tall gable end with rakes rising to the peak. Light only the address side and the house goes dark exactly where the side street looks at it.

There are three sensible scopes for a corner house:

• Front plus the street-side elevation. The full look from both streets, with the back and the interior side left dark. On most corner lots this is the right answer.
• Front with a return. Where the roof is hipped, carrying the eave around the corner and a short way along the street side can be enough to keep that view from looking cut off.
• Front only, ending at the far corner. Works when the side-street view is screened by trees or a fence, or when the house sits far back from that street.

The cost follows the footage. If the two street faces together measure 200 feet, for example, that is $4,400–$6,800 installed once, the same as the front of a larger colonial. The easiest way to see your own number is to measure each street face separately and add them, which the LightCast tool handles one photo at a time.

The backyard and deck view

Ask where you actually spend evenings. On a lot of Macomb and Oakland colonials, the family room, the kitchen table and the deck all face the back. If that is your house, you will see the back eave far more often than the front, especially from May through September.

One fixture gives you both warm white and full color, and the back eave can carry its own brightness and schedule from your phone. A lit back eave works as soft warm white over the deck on summer nights and joins the front for colors on the holidays. That is a different reason to light the back than the street view, and it can justify the footage on its own.

Lake homes are the clearest case. On the lakes around West Bloomfield and the rest of Oakland County, the water side is often the elevation people see most, from across the water, and the West Bloomfield street-side footage is measured separately from it for that reason. A front-plus-lake-side scope, with the two interior sides left dark, is a sensible way to split it.

If the back faces a close neighbor instead of a yard you use, the case gets weaker. Brightness is adjustable, but a lit eave over a fence line mostly shows up in someone else's window.

Adding sides later

Starting with the front and adding later is a reasonable plan. It lets you live with the lit front for a season before deciding whether you want more. A few things make it go smoothly.

1. Measure the whole house now. Trace every elevation in the tool, even the ones you are not ordering, so you know the full number and can decide with both figures in front of you.
2. End the front where a side would begin. An outside corner is both the cleanest stop today and the natural starting point for a later run.
3. Ask about zones and the controller. The system is zoned and controlled from your phone. At the estimate, ask whether the controller you are getting has room for another zone, so a later side joins the same app and schedules.
4. Keep the channel color on record. Your channel gets matched to the trim color. A later run should match the first one, so note the color that went on.
5. Book it like any autumn install. A later addition is a separate autumn visit, measured and quoted per lit foot, and the autumn calendar fills in order.

The honest tradeoff: one visit covers everything, while front now and sides later means two. If you already know you want the whole house, do it at once. If you are unsure, the front is the part you will never regret. For why the per-foot rate sits where it does, read why permanent Christmas lights cost what they do.

Before you decide, measure your front elevation with LightCast from one photo taken at the curb, then take a second straight-on photo of the side or back and measure that too. Two numbers side by side settle the scope question faster than anything we could write here. When you have them, request an estimate with both figures and we will confirm within 24 hours.

Where this applies

Typical roofline lengths and priced examples for these communities are on their own pages.

• Sterling Heights
• Troy
• Commerce Township